Garden Week 2 Update

Today my garden is 2 weeks old and thriving!! Here are some pics:

My carrots and green onions are growing nicely (I figured out which ones are which now :)
These are my beautiful bush beans. Aren't they gorgeous! I am so proud of them!

So the garden is doing great, and I have high hopes for this summer's harvest. I have plans for expanding my garden by adding some more plants in containers surrounding our back patio. Hopefully I can get tomatoes, sweet potatoes, and more squash growing soon!

Garden Week 1 Update

Today is exactly one week from when we planted our garden and here is our progress: I think that the leaves of the plants already look leafier (that's a word, right?)
Look at the green!!! (You can see it really well if you click on the picture) I was so excited once I noticed the green shoots coming up through the soil. I only wish I could remember what exactly I planted there... I think carrots? Definitely either carrots or green onions. I do remember that the seeds were so small that I just planted a bunch of them, thinking that maybe 1 in 5 would start to grow. I may have been mistaken...but I am pretty sure that I can just go through and prune them out. Once I figure out what they are. (I really should have written that down!) This is in my bush bean section. I planted four beans in this square and this guy is already coming up! There is another one coming through in a square next to it, but the picture didn't really turn out so you will have to take my word for it.

Yea for getting things done!

Today I was bitten by the productivity bug! I got so much done and it felt sooooo good :) The weather was gorgeous this morning so I decided to go for a run before meeting up with my neighbor to go to the gym. I usually take a 2 mile route near my house that goes by the hillsborough river and this morning the sun was shining and reflecting off of the river and the wind was nice and cool. I'm trying to work on my speed, so unfortunately for the first mile I didn't notice any of this. Instead, I was thinking about how tired I was, how stupid running is, trying to convince myself to not wuss out and regretting having cookies for breakfast (what? vanilla wafers aren't the breakfast of champions?) In the end it was worth it because I did the first mile in 8:47. Woohoo!! Of course after that I had to choose between continuing to run and probably throwing up my very healthy breakfast or walking home. I walked home.

After going to the gym with my next door neighbor, I came home, took a shower, and planned out the rest of my day. I decided to go to a nearby town about 15 minutes away in an attempt to find a Joann's so that I could get some yarn for an afghan I want to make. I got a little lost, but I stumbled onto a Michael's in a shopping center with a Beall's Outlet AND a TJmaxx. I had so much fun looking through clearance racks and thinking of decorating ideas for our apartment. After at least an hour I made my way to Michael's only to spend at least 30 minutes in their yarn aisle trying to decide what color, type, and texture of yarn that I wanted. Decisions!!

Now, in order to make this trip I had to laugh at how much courage I had to muster to drive by myself. The roads here terrify me! To get anywhere you have to get on at least some sort of highway that has all sorts of different types of merging lanes and exit lanes and crosslanes with other highways. I see and hear about crashes all of the time, and my car is not known for being reliable under pressure (i.e. going more than 50 miles an hour, maneuvering in high winds, or basically anything out of the ordinary). On the way home, I had to exit off of one road onto a very curvy off ramp which then turned into an exit only lane so I had to switch lanes AND accelerate immediately. The entire time, without even realizing I was doing it, I was doing breathing exercises like I was in labor, "in through the nose, out through the mouth, in through the nose, out through the mouth". My entire body was clenched and I had broken into cold sweats! Did I mention that relatively, this wasn't that big of a road and the average speed was about 55 miles an hour? Yeah. Ummm, I hate to say this but I really need to force myself to get more comfortable driving around here. (Don't tell Anthony I said that!!!!)

As for the rest of the days accomplishments:
-I did three full loads of laundry all by myself, quite a feat when you have to use a laundromat (boo!).
-Did a weeks worth of dirty dishes. Yep, let the dirty dishes pile up all week and then tackle them on the weekend, that's how I role.
-Put up the rest of the pictures and decorations that have been leaning against walls waiting to be put up since we moved. Eight months ago.
-Did the grocery shopping
-Tried out a homemade concoction on a few white shirts to try to get those annoying yellow sweat stains out. And yes, they were my shirts because I sweat like a man :)
-Worked on my YW's lesson for tomorrow and made little trees out of tootsie roll pops and green tissue paper because it wouldn't be a young women's lesson without crafty treats!

Now at the end of a very fruitful day I am going to set my clocks forward, get ready for bed, and thank Heavenly Father for days like today :)

Square Foot Garden

Today I took a half day off of work and Anthony and I got all the supplies for our very own square foot garden. I have been thinking about doing this for awhile, and I spent a good amount of time on the internet planning how I wanted to do everything and in the end it was pretty easy. (Which doesn't usually happen for us) I am hoping that I am able to keep everything alive...and make it grow bigger...and have tons of veggies...but no high expectations or anything :)

Here is what it looks like on the side of our back porch:
The garden soil we bought for this smelled suspiciously like manure. A lot like manure. I wonder if they repackage it is as "organic manure" instead of "organic garden soil" how much they will sell?So there you have it. Cross your fingers that I don't kill everything!

Spring Break Belongs to Fishermen

Anthony FINALLY got to go fishing yesterday since it is spring break and boy did he do it up! He caught some people-sized fish:
He was so excited when he got home he didn't even take a shower, he went straight to the computer to upload the photos and start brag posting. And who could blame him? Did you see the size of those fish???

Having fun!

It's been a pretty eventful past few weeks in the Lagana household. We've been trying to make an effort to do more than just our everyday routine and we've had a lot of fun in the process.

The first thing that we did was to go to a Postsecret event held at USF. If you haven't heard of Postsecret before, it is a community project started by a guy called Frank Warren. He started to have strangers send him postcards with their secrets on it, secrets they have never told anyone. That was years ago and now he gets hundreds of secrets delivered to his mailbox everyday. He puts the best ones together into a collection and publishes them as well as travels around the country to give lectures. It was really interesting to hear him talk about the power in letting go of a secret, whether it is a secret you are keeping from yourself or from other people. Here is an example of the types of postcards he gets (I really like the happy ones): It was fun to hear him speak and to see some of the secrets he wasn't allowed to put in the book because of copyright issues, etc...

A few days later, it was my 24th birthday!! Yea for birthdays!!! We didn't have anything big planned but it turned out really good. My coworkers got me some really thoughtful gifts and a delicious cookie cake (my fave!), Anthony got me a new memory foam pillow, chocolate, and flowers. Plus, Ant and I met my mom in Orlando to have dinner with her. It was so nice to have the time driving there and back to catch up with Anthony and to have the time during dinner to catch up with my mom. The only sad part of the day was when I had to go to bed and realized that the day was over :(

A few days after that (last Saturday in fact) I ran in my second 5k! I hadn't been training at all for it but I signed up because a few of my friends were going. Plus, it was such a big race that I figured that I had to go at least to experience it :) The race itself was called "Gasparilla" and it has a long history in Tampa. It is similar to Mardi Gras, they have beads and a parade and all sorts of partying but it is all in celebration of a Spanish pirate that operated in Southwest florida. The race was reallly fun, the 5K alone had over 8,000 participants! Here is the official pirate ship that stays docked for the festivies:
So, the actual race was pretty miserable. It was cold and rainy and windy. I seriously wondered how many participants they would have had if they had a refund policy. I know I definitely had in the back of my mind "I paid $30 to run in this race, I better go!" even though the weather wasn't ideal. There were so many participants that they had to stage us in front of the start line according to how serious we were about running it. The fast people got to go first, followed by the not so fast runners, followed by the walkers. I started in the not-so-fast group. There was such a variety of runners! I saw little kids, older adults, and everything in between. I finished with a time of 33:49, which at least was better than the last one I did. I'm going to try to do another one in a few months and really speed it up!